1. Field of the Invention:
The present invention relates, in general, to an educational device for use in teaching writing skills and, more specifically, the use of pencil, pen, and/or brush in free-hand forming phonetic, numerical or pictorial letters and characters.
2. Description of the Related Art:
Various patents have heretofore issued on improved writing aids and the like. See, for example, Higbee, U.S. Pat. No. 1,143,393; Lorber, U.S. Pat. No. 1,887,161; Lucero, U.S. Pat. No. 3,382,592; Paul, U.S. Pat. No. 3,731,402; Chandler, Australian Pat. No. 101,845; and Weiss, French Pat. No. 2,516,893. None of the above patents disclose or sugeest the present invention.
Grooved or through-cut lettering guides have long been available and currently are marketed under various brand names such as "Leroy", "Tech-Graphic", "Wrico", etc. Such lettering guides are 100% mechanically guided, and thus are not designed to be used in the primary teaching of letter forms and names and are not suited for teaching young children. More specifically, the chief use for such lettering guides is for the preparation of maps, presentation drawings in the mechanical and construction trades, and for lettering drawings which will be reprinted thousands of times, such as the wiring diagrams found on major household appliances.
The familiar ABC blocks are usually the first letter-teaching devices given to a child. However, such blocks do not teach anything about copying the letters and the child typically loses interest in the blocks before becoming interested in lettering.
Educational television is currently achieving excellent success in the teaching of both the shapes and the sounds of letters. However, such educational television reaches only a fortunate segment of the world's population, is entirely visual in nature and thus does not provide manual or hand training. Further, the student can respond only while a particular exercise is being shown and the student may have to compete with other family members for viewing time, etc.
The most popular means of pre-school child education requires that the teacher, usually a parent, properly place a pencil into the child's grasp, then place the teacher's hand over that of the child, and guide the child's hand while an attempt is made to produce an acceptable letter.
Though in use since alphabets were first invented, the method, a one-on-one operation, remains very slow and inefficient. Also, the modern trend is for both parents to accept employment outside the home, thus drastically reducing the time available for child pre-education. Further, parents are leaving their children with child-care enterprises which of course want as many children as their operation permits, thus resulting in groups where the one-on-one teaching method is inapplicable.
Hence the invention hereinafter disclosed.